The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are approaching, and with them, the preparation of Olympic athletes is intensifying month by month, to be ready to collect as many medals as possible from July 26 to August 11, 2024. We've chosen to meet a dozen French athletes, who have already qualified or will be trying to qualify during the final months before the competition, to help you discover their passion and their world! This is your chance to find out more about some of the lesser-known disciplines or those recently added to the Olympic program, and to support the athletes who have touched your heart!
For the sixth interview in this series, we set out to meet Mejdi Schalck, considered the young prodigy of his discipline. A 19-year-old professional climber and winner of several World Cups, he spoke to Sortir à Paris about his sport, climbing, and his hopes and expectations for the Paris 2024 Games. We took the opportunity to meet Oriane Bertone, also 19 and already qualified, and ask him a few questions!
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It's one of the four new sports at these Paris 2024 Olympic Games: sport climbing is an impressive and exciting discipline. Discover its history, its great athletes, its specificities... [Read more]
It's simple: the aim is toget to the top of a wall, which can range from 5 to 20 metres indoors! It's climbing, a sport where you have to be very instinctive and let yourself go. It's an individual sport, but there's a lot of sharing and teamwork involved too!
In climbing, there are three disciplines: bouldering, difficulty and speed. At the Olympic Games, bouldering and difficulty will be combined, while speed is a separate discipline. In speed, the aim is to get to the top of a 15-metre wall on the same route as quickly as possible, usually in the form of a duel.
Then the bouldering will be on 4 to 5-metre walls, and you'll have to get to the top of four or five different routes in a limited time and try to complete them all. And the difficulty is a 20-metre wall, roped, usually with a route, and the aim is always to get to the top!
It started in August 2023, with the first tickets to the World Championships in Berne, 3 places for girls and 3 places for boys, so it was pretty restricted. There was a continental tournament so they took the winner from each continent, currently there are 8 qualifiers in the world. And there will be world qualification tournaments in May and June, very shortly before the Olympic Games, with 12 possible places for a total of 20.
Mejdi - I don't want to put any pressure on myself. I love climbing, I love competition, so it excites me all the more to know that the Olympics are coming up at home, and I see it more as a boost than pressure!
Mejdi - It's going to be at Le Bourget! Personally, I was born and raised in Montreuil until I was 13, so it's in the 93, it's next door, for me it's got a pretty special value and it's going to be really incredible to compete there, I'm really looking forward to it!
We'd already seen over the last ten years or so that the sport was really developing and evolving very rapidly. There were gyms opening everywhere, more and more climbers, and the fact that it was Olympic added a huge boost to all that, and the sport exploded, which is a great thing. As far as making a living from our sport as athletes goes, we're a lot more, and that's great!
The answer is easy for those who know a little about climbing: it's the Japanese! They've been dominating the world circuit for the last ten years or so, and especially since last year, we've been shaking them up a bit, but in their culture, climbing is one of the most practiced sports over there, there are a lot of climbers and they're very, very strong! I don't know, they've got genes, they stick to the holds, it's amazing!
Mejdi - It's a competition like any other, so I prepare myself in the same way, but of course, mentally, you approach it differently and you have to be well prepared for all the excitement there's going to be, which you're going to feel all the more, compared to another Olympiad.
Oriane - Not much, in the sense that preparation is always done at home, it's just routine! After that, the stakes are obviously different.
Mejdi - Ever since I was a little boy, I've been climbing all over the place, in trees, on the furniture at home, it was an instinctive thing I had in me. I had a park next to my house where I climbed all the time, and my mother was a bit scared, so she found a climbing club that was allowed for 8-year-olds and over.
I was 5 years old, I had a bit of a crisis and they let me climb, they saw that I was doing really well and they said, "Come on, let's take him"! That's when it all started, and especially since I was 10, I've been climbing a lot, and I discovered that there were gyms all over the place near where I live. In fact, once I started, I never saw myself stopping!
Oriane - I started when I was 8 years old, so it's been 10 years already! (laughs) I fell in love with the sport straight away, I used to do a lot of it at the same time, wrestling, horse-riding, swimming, and then I discovered climbing and I stopped everything to do that, and now it's my life!
Mejdi - It's my main passion and it's 99.9%, or rather 200%, of my life! This sport has made me grow enormously, and there's a great notion of sharing in climbing, of exchanging, of meeting people from all over the world. It's really crazy to experience that and I'm so happy.
Oriane - Really, it's my life, because I live from it, it's what makes me who I am today, it's how I express myself, in the end, I live from it! After that, it's also about investment and hard work, because it's proof that you can't just snap your fingers and get everything. Even if climbing has developed a lot on social networks, it's not as easy as people think, there's a lot of work behind it!
Mejdi - I've always been a fan of the best climbers, I've always watched climbing videos with Adam Ondra and the best French athletes, like Mickael Mawem and Manuel Cornu, and now I' m on the French team with them, it's a dream!
Oriane - I'm from Reunion Island, I grew up in sport and when I started doing it, I was always a bit removed from what you could see on TV, at the Games. Climbing is a sport that's very new to the Olympics, and we didn't have the culture of watching our favorite athletes on TV! So I didn't grow up saying to myself in front of someone"one day, I want to be like him", but rather telling myself that I wanted to become better and be part of those who inspire others.
Mejdi - I'd say it's my style! It's quite new school and freestyle, I'm very aerial and dynamic in my climbing, I excel in this style and that's often what makes me win and go for medals!
Oriane - I think we're all getting more and more involved in our climbing, so it's going to be small details, to be honest. After that, the thing that allows me to say"ok, if I'm here, it's thanks to this", is the pleasure I get from climbing and having fun, and even if it's never easy and I'm in pain, going beyond my comfort zone, it's still a thrill to wake up and say to myself that this is my job, I'm going to climb!
Mejdi - The extreme side of it, that was mostly 20-25 years ago, I'd say, at the very beginning, in the 90s even! By the time I started climbing, it was already a family sport for me, but it just wasn't very democratized. The fact that so many gyms are opening has just increased that effect.
Oriane - It's a sport that's gone up, when you look at 10 years ago, the number of climbing gyms even in Paris was divided by 10, even 15! It's become popular. In Reunion Island, when I started out, we didn't have a climbing gym, so I climbed alone in the gullies, so some days when I arrived, the boulder was gone because it had rained, and that was extreme sport! You hadcrashpads, mats, but if you fell, like on your ankle, that was it!
It's so much more controlled, if there's a brush on the mat, you get a fight because if you fall on it, you can get hurt. It's become a much easier sport to practice, you just have to rent or buy a pair of slippers, some liquid chalk, bring your mates and it costs 10 euros, it's fun!
Mejdi - I'd say the Arkose gym in Montreuil, it was when I was 10, I discovered there was a gym just 10 minutes from my house by bike, I went there one evening to try it out and I immediately took out a year's subscription, and from then on I went there every evening for three years, and it was really my hangout after class! It's where climbing became a huge part of my life and where it all started for me, so it's important to me.
Oriane - It's not a place that's marked my life, in the sense that it's been marked by achievements and medals. After that, in the Paris region, there's a place where I train all the time, at Arkose, which is the only place I climb. I live in Massy, so I spend my life at Arkose there, plus the food is really good! (laughs)
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Mejdi - Of course, the Arkose halls are great, but outside, there's also Fontainebleau where I love to go, weather permitting, it's really cool! It gives you fresh air and it's good for you.
Oriane - We all know Fontainebleau, because it's almost the only place in the region where you can climb, and it's in the forest, so it's magical! Coming from Réunion Island, it's a spot I dreamed of when I was little! I'd go there for a month, once a year, and when I'd come back, I'd be so sad I'd want to go back! In the end, this is the place that marked my life, because I grew up in this forest and it's a pure joy to go there, now that I live next door!
Mejdi - Don't hesitate, come and climb, ideally with your mates because it's always cooler. There are gyms all over Paris, so don 't waste any time and come and climb!
Oriane - For a young person, it's good to practice a lot to make real progress and start climbing! Climbing is very popular, and there are many different opinions on training and progress, but there's one thing that's 100% certain, and that's that you need to climb a lot. In the very first years, from the moment you think you can still progress by climbing, you've got to go for it and not listen to those who talk about weight training, just climb!
Mejdi - When I was a kid, around the age of 14, I started to get results in competitions, then one day at training, I had a slump and my coach said to me"come on man, you're a killer!". And I don't know, it triggered something in me, he repeated it to me, and now it's the phrase I say to myself all the time.
Oriane - Something I was told a lot when I was little, by my father, was"hard work pays off", because the investment you make now is for later! And every time it's hard and I tell myself I can't take it anymore, I say that to myself, and it gets better.
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Paris 2024 Olympics: everything you need to know about sport climbing, its history, rules, records
Open-air and outdoor climbing sites and gyms in Paris and the Ile-de-France region
